


Athena Rising

by magikfanfic



Series: As Safe as Possible [1]
Category: Runaways (Comics), Runaways (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Mutual Pining, other characters are mentioned but are not present
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 09:07:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13050900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magikfanfic/pseuds/magikfanfic
Summary: The Hostel gets unnervingly quiet late at night or early morning depending on how you want to look at it. Chase Stein has always been of the opinion that it doesn’t count as morning or even tomorrow until you’ve slept, no matter what time or date shows up on his phone. That’s just the way things are. However you want to define it, it’s late, and it’s quiet, and he should be asleep. All he’s been doing though is endlessly tossing and turning, plagued by nightmares as soon as he closes his eyes.ETA: Now with a sequel:Pretty Disappointment.





	Athena Rising

**Author's Note:**

> This one is shaky at best and a smashing together of comic and show canon because I can. I should also state that most of the time when I write these characters, it's RP based or fanfic set after they're together. I've not done a lot of getting together fics, which is what this sort of borders on, and I'll likely be trying more of these out as the show goes on. 
> 
> Basically I had a dream wherein Chase was singing to Gert to comfort her, and this is where it got us.

The Hostel gets unnervingly quiet late at night or early morning depending on how you want to look at it. Chase Stein has always been of the opinion that it doesn’t count as morning or even tomorrow until you’ve slept, no matter what time or date shows up on his phone. That’s just the way things are. However you want to define it, it’s late, and it’s quiet, and he should be asleep. All he’s been doing though is endlessly tossing and turning, plagued by nightmares as soon as he closes his eyes. Most of them are about his father. His father’s eyes. The way his father’s mouth twists when he is angry. How the muscles in his jaw clench when he pulls his hand back. The look on his face when the blow lands. Every time he closes his eyes, he hears his father’s voice, “If you were scared of me, you wouldn’t be failing.”

He thought he had put these nightmares behind him years ago, finally gotten his dad out of his dreams. Facing him in reality, in the daytime, was more than enough, why let him have the night, too?

It’s not always that easy, Chase knows. You don’t always get what you want. More often than not, he thinks, as he tosses and turns and swipes a hand through his hair with a frustrated noise, you don’t even really get what you need. You just get what other people think you need. Sometimes you don’t even know what you need. That one, that last one, is the most troubling of them all.

Finally, when he just physically cannot take another moment of lying there, staring into the blackness and trying not to remember how dark his father’s eyes get when he’s in a rage, he just gets up, leaves the rooms, wanders the vast and twisting hallways of their sunken, underground hideout. Half the things in here shouldn’t work, but they do. The electric, the plumbing. Alex swears that he has properly tricked the utility companies and their servers, and they’ll be none the wiser, but Chase worries about it anyway. What will they do if everything stops? He’s the oldest, and he’s still used to thinking of himself as the strongest even if he isn’t anymore (go Molly), but he can’t shake the idea that it’s his job to protect them. He’s always been the one putting himself between the others and whatever bully decided that they were an easy target. He’s always been the one ready to take the punch or the jab, to grab something back that was stolen. It’s not like he hasn’t been hurt before. If anything, Chase is used to it, and he always thought, well, might as well keep anyone else from getting used to it.

Not that it mattered. When Amy died, they all got hurt. He couldn’t do anything about that. Then they drifted apart, scattered to their own seas, and he stopped trying to protect them, even started actively hurting them himself. With his words. And his actions. And his complacency. Just sitting back, sinking into being popular, letting the world have a go at them. 

It seems like the sort of thing that his father would do. Chase has never wanted to be his father. Chase has always wanted to be anything other than his father with his glinting eyes and harsh words and strong hand. Genius. Savior of mankind. Dedicated. Misunderstood. Volatile. These are all words that he has heard connected with his father, and Chase doesn’t want any of them. 

He thinks about their parents, all of them, as he walks the corridors, losing himself in the twists and turns of the hallways but not really worrying about where he’ll end up. He’ll find the others eventually, he always does. Their paths lead back together inevitably it seems, a circle always going round, never broken. Of all the parents, he likes the Yorkes the most, thinks that their involvement in this thing is the most surprising. Supportive, lenient, weird, full of hugs and strange homemade organic snacks, spouting embarrassing information at the top of their lungs, wearing ugly sweaters unironically. Raising Gert and Molly. And Gert and Molly are probably two of the best people that he knows. Even if Gert has a mouth full of acid ready to strike at anyone who gets too close. Still. He’s never seen her back down from much, and she can be unerringly kind if you give her the chance when no one's looking. 

He threads his hands together behind his head as he walks, paying no attention to the weird art on the walls or the doors that he passes. Instead, he thinks about when they were young, Gert, tiny, tiny and full of a rage that he still doesn’t understand from a child, defending everyone in the ways that he could not. Where Chase was protective physically, making himself a wall between them and their problems, Gert was verbally protective of the others, constantly coming to their defense with a vocabulary large enough that it got her in trouble on more than one occasion. Gert, the pacifist, who, though a full head smaller than any of them, would pop up in front of him to tear other boys down on the playground when they harassed him, spouting words that none of the other kids knew except that they were biting, that they were supposed to sting.

When Chase first read the myths of the Greeks, he stared at the page about Athena for a full two minutes. Sprung fully grown from the head of her father, wiser than anyone around her, fearless. Captivating. Later, shyly, he had told Gert about his revelation, that he had found her patron goddess and she had looked at him like he had told her that he had seen the tooth fairy before, quite concisely, cutting down all organized religion, even those long and mostly dead. He might have had the decency to be heartbroken if it hadn’t seemed so fitting. When he wouldn’t stop smiling, Gert had gotten flustered and walked away.

It wasn’t until several years later, having called her “our Athena” on the playground, that someone tossed out a quip he hadn’t considered, one that made him stop mentioning the nickname at all. “Yeah, just as heartless.” And Chase’s chest had constricted, and his brow had furrowed, hands clenched, ready to defend.

But Gert’s only reaction was the smallest, tiniest flinch in her shoulders, and the way her mouth creased around the edges as she frowned. Chase’s stomach had become a pit, pulling the rest of his insides into it as he watched her, as he saw it, and he didn’t know where to unleash his anger, at the kid who said it or at himself. He was frozen. Like when his father would rail at him, looming, tall, everywhere. He could do nothing.

Eventually, Gert had just looked at him, face back to its normal expression of passing disregard, and shrugged as if nothing had happened, and Chase had finally unstuck, but he couldn’t apologize, couldn’t do anything except never mention it again because he didn’t know how to explain. That he had never meant that. He had never read Athena to be like that in the smattering of myths and legends that he poured through, far beyond what was required reading for the lesson, just really getting into it because it was fascinating, and he liked the idea of it. Athena had never seemed cold or aloof or heartless. She was just discerning, protective, smart. And maybe wary of people. Her father had swallowed her mother, after all. She had been born from his head because she refused to not be born at all. That would make someone a little hesitant around others.

Gert was still Athena after that day. Chase just couldn’t voice it anymore for fear of seeing that flinch, that frown. She still is all these years later.

Chase cannot remember Molly’s parents clearly. They are just a blur, and an afternoon spent in an itchy suit while two coffins were lowered into the ground. What he does remember is a day with all of them together several months after Molly went to live with Gert, sitting around a table snacking on carrots and orange slices, Gert being weirdly meticulous about eating them in a precise order and giving at least half of her food to Molly while the younger girl handed it back. 

Nico looking from Gert to Molly and then to Amy before saying, “She’s not your real sister,” without anything behind it, just an observation, just a statement.

And Gert, fierce, and fiery, and full of the kind of fury that Chase thinks he has never known because even when he is angry there is something in his gut that tells him to hold back, not to fall into it because who knows what will happen then, what he will become, had stood up, one hand clenched around Molly’s wrist like she was terrified the girl might be taken away. “She is! It doesn’t matter. She’s my sister. Always.” Her voice loud and offering no question, no chance for anyone to say anything to the contrary.

The rest of them quiet, stunned, until someone got Gert to sit down again, but Chase remembers that she continued holding Molly's wrist and shook a little, eyes wide in her fear panic that they would come to know better in the passing years. 

Chase thinks, as he walks, that despite her fears and her anxiety and her nerves and her tendency to speak before she thinks through things fully, that maybe Gert is the one of them who is the least afraid, maybe Gert is the one of them who is the most herself even when she is patently hiding something. Chase envies that about her, the whip-quick tongue, that knowledge of herself even when she gatekeeps her feelings. Gert doesn't like liars or cowards. Chase wonders whether she likes him anymore; he so often feels like both. Especially under his father's gaze. 

In his wanderings, he finds himself in the main living room, which is wide and full of mismatched furniture. Curled tight on one of the couches, dozing dinosaur spread across the rug at her feet, is Gert. Awake. Reading, or pretending to be, on the ancient tablet she grabbed despite the fact that they specified essentials. Trust Gert to consider knowledge essential, more than extra toothbrushes or spare socks. Gert stated and Alex confirmed that the tablet is untraceable, no Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth, nothing to give them away, only the worlds and the words that it contains. 

Chase wonders what she reads now, remembers how enthusiastically she would shove Atwood and Dostechesky and Thoreau at them when the rest of them were really too young to understand. She stopped sharing along the way. They all did. He misses it. He misses her, and her simmering rage at the way the world runs, corruption inherent under the floorboards, liars all around, the warming planet, the threat of extinction. How reading the wrong newspaper headline could send her into a spiral for two days until she learned to manage through it. How her hands would shake when she picked up the phone. How sometimes he would just call for her instead because it was what he could do to protect her, one of the few things that she would allow.

The way he clutched round her in her parents' lab while the dinosaur whipped around them was another attempt to protect her, and he has tried not to linger on those memories because they fire something weird in his chest. He tries not to linger on her words, how they made him hurt. It's easy to like Karo, expected. Isn’t she everything he is supposed to want? Don’t they look right together from the outside? The same cannot be said for Gert. Those feelings are not easy, not expected. He puts that aside because it's confusing, requires so much more work, and because it's like scaling a wall of thorns. 

Also, she is Athena. What is he compared to that? Probably nothing. Very small. Nothing to be noticed at all except in the ways in which he has hurt her over the years.

But it is late, and she is not sleeping. She is still on the couch, eyes on the tablet but in a way that suggests she doesn't actually see it. And he remembers her talking about the anxiety, the worry, getting so bad that she couldn't sleep. He wonders if she brought her meds. He doesn't even know if she still takes them or how they can get them refilled if needed. They are runaways. Everything is harder now. They do not need to make things harder on themselves, on each other. 

Maybe he cannot protect them from their parents or the world, but maybe he can protect them from themselves. Maybe that can matter. 

“Hey,” he greets from the doorway because a startled Gert is scary and even more so now that she is accompanied by a dinosaur that adores her and heeds her commands.

Gert looks in his direction, but Chase imagines that her eyes, big and bright behind those large glasses, see into and through him, pick up on everything wrong he has ever done and magnifies those mistakes until they are larger than he will ever be. Her shape on the couch is small, curled, but her presence almost seems larger than the mansion itself. “Hey yourself.”

“It's late. Shouldn't you be asleep?” These words are inane, but he finds that he cannot stop them. 

Gert looks back at the tablet as though done with him. “Pot, kettle.” Her tone lacks its normal snap, falls on the ground, tired. 

It is the smallest of brush-offs, especially considering who it is coming from, and Chase steps forward, toward her, instead of back. Gert does not glare, and the dinosaur gives no indication of waking up to encourage him to leave. The dinosaur, as fucking awesome as it is, just adds yet another layer to the walls of defenses that Gert has built over the years. The acid tone, the vocabulary capable of tossing boulders without anyone realizing they’re stones at all, the stacks of books and problems squeezed into one brain that seems to be the size of a galaxy, a heart hidden under all of it. And now there’s a dinosaur so that Gert can always keep people away if she wants to. He appreciates the fact that Gert, who can’t land a punch, who would never accept self-defense lessons, who wouldn’t take tasers or pepper spray, has something physical to protect her now, but at the same time, he worries. How will any of them get close to her again now when it will be so easy for her to keep them away? Molly seems to the only one she clings to, the only one she really talks to, but Molly is young and Gert is cognizant of this, does her best to keep it that way as much as she can. Because, like she said all those years ago, Molly is her sister. Always. No matter the circumstances.

When he settles on the other end of the couch, Gert does not face him, stays where she is, gaze on the tablet that looks to be turned off at this point. A farce. A facade. Or just one of the few security blankets she can reach for here. Chase brushes a hand through his hair, not completely used to sitting quietly with her, not really used to sitting in silence at all. With their group, there is always at least one person talking, often several of them talking over each other, words and intent clamoring to be heard, to cut through the years of separation and be understood. Isn’t that what all of them want? To be understood. To not feel alone. 

“Couldn’t sleep?” he asks because he doesn’t know what else to do, but he cannot take the weight of nothing.

“Gold star.” 

Chase is used to Gert sounding so much older than she is, but now she sounds young and petulant and more tired than anyone their age has a right to be. It sticks between his ribs and aches like a pulled muscle, like a wound, but he doesn’t know what to do to ease it, has no idea why it lances so deeply anyway. Chase Stein is not dumb, not like he pretends to be, but things do give him trouble occasionally. There are things that he just does not understand. Like why he wants to reach out and brush the hair away from her face, like how he wants to figure out how to make her smile because Gert lights up when she smiles. Athena. Bright and bold and--say it--beautiful. Even if he doesn’t know what to do with that knowledge. Even if it frightens him to his core in a way that his father, terrifying as he was/is, never could be. 

So he does what he knows how to do; he talks and hopes that it will help. “I just keep thinking. I can’t stop thinking.”

“That must be painful for you.”

He tries not to flinch. It makes it easier that there is no heat to the words, no jab, just Gert playing along in the way she is supposed to, going through the motions to maintain her walls. Hey, he wants to say, you can stop that. He wants to pull her close and tell her it’s okay to let go. She doesn’t have to be a wall. She doesn’t have to be alone. She can trust the rest of them. Not just Molly. Not just the dinosaur. But can she? How long has it been since the rest of them really gave her the time of day and not just the occasional shout out or eye roll in the hall because, hey, look there goes Gert who won’t shut up, who won’t sit down, who stands out everywhere. It’s become easier to look over her, especially for Chase who has trouble with his own reflection. Gert casts a shadow ten feet tall with her principles and how much she tries and how much she cares even if she sometimes expresses it in the wrong ways. It must be lonely in a spotlight that seems to just ostracize her. Even from them.

“You can stop that,” he says, very gently, surprising the both of them. It’s hard to catch surprise on Gert, but there’s this telltale thing she does, tucking her chin in a little, that he learned when they were young. He laces his hands behind his head and leans back into the couch, tries to be cool, tries to be Chase Stein the guy that people looked up to in the halls, golden boy of lacrosse, popular, athlete, handsome. It feels like a dream, fading, slipping away under his fingers. Was he ever even really that boy? Or was he just someone trying to paint a picture, desperately attempting to stop being the Chase who helped remake sand castles after bullies knocked them down, who would call Gert “our Athena” in adoration without batting an eye, who handed over his own snacks when the others lost theirs every time. 

Gert, for her part, says nothing, and he is edging into full-blown worry now because this is the quietest he has seen Gert since she got strep throat one year and lost her voice. He would text her pictures of birds and tell her to get better soon. Gert would explain how antibiotics worked and that soon was not anything that could be decided by her. Chase would text her that he missed her voice, missed her singing. Gert’s reply would just be eye-roll emojis, but he knew that she liked it. No matter how she responded.

Chase hasn’t heard Gert sing in a very long time. Since before Amy’s death. Chase doesn’t know if Gert sings anymore. The rest of them aren’t very musical. It was Gert’s thing to do with Amy. Alex had video games with her. He had sports. Karo had fashion. Molly had stuffed animals and hats. Nico had, well, everything. But Gert and Amy had music, and that was the only thing that Chase was really jealous of because it was so much more interesting than the others, and it seemed so rare. He would have listened to them sing together forever. He would listen to Gert sing forever now as well.

When the silence stretches on too long, he starts talking again. It’s his go to. It normally works. He’s not used to it not working. “I keep thinking. And when I do fall asleep it’s just nightmares. Nightmares lead to more thinking. Thinking leads to more nightmares. So I thought why not just stop trying to sleep at all. It can’t really be that important, right?” No response. “I mean, if you’re not sleeping, it can’t be that important. If it was important, you’d be doing that instead of out here reading.” He leans slightly towards her, and he can confirm now that there is nothing on the tablet just as he had suspected, though he doesn’t give it away. “What are you reading?”

That actually gets her to put the tablet down and kind of turn towards him, leaning her back against the armrest, stretching her legs out so that, if he wanted, he could wrap his fingers all the way around her ankle from where it rests just next to his thigh almost touching but not quite. On someone else, the movement might not mean anything, but this is Gert so everything means something, and he is thankful for what feels, perhaps strangely, like a door opening.

“What are the nightmares about?”

Chase almost freezes not just at the question, although that rocks him to his toes because he hasn’t talked about that, he doesn’t talk about that, they don’t need to know about that, but also because of the way the question is asked. The tone of voice. It is less caustic, smartmouth Gert, and more. More the Gert he remembers with the shaking hands who couldn’t make a phone call. It’s almost enough to undo him. He doesn’t want to open this door, but he’s not sure that keeping it closed is worth slamming the one that Gert has just offered. He threads his hands together in his lap and looks at them because he can feel her eyes on him, heavy, weighty, like she is fifteen people instead of one, like she is everything instead of just the girl with too many opinions and too many causes and just too much. Gert Yorkes is and always has been too much unless she stops. She has stopped. She has stopped right now, and he likes that, when she stops and pauses to look at him. He doesn’t want to lose it.

“My dad.” The words are soft, barely above a whisper, and oh, he feels guilty. He feels wrong uttering it, like he has loosed a secret into the air, like his dad will know and find him from just that alone. It’s like those sirens from Kill Bill are going off in his head. His shoulders have tensed, ready for a blow to land.

But nothing comes. 

When he looks up and over at Gert, she is just watching him, eyes soft behind her glasses, like she is seeing him instead of looking through him. He wonders if she knows already. Of everyone, it would probably be Gert who knows. It’s hard to hide things from her, always has been. But there is no judgment in her gaze or the set of her mouth, there are no sharp angles to her right now. If she was anyone else, he probably would have already tugged her closer, slipped a companionable arm around her shoulders, but Gert is like no one else, and touching her has always been the hardest. Sometimes she shies away from contact at all. Sometimes he worries that his hands, stained with failure, will cover her in soot marks.

“The ritual?” she tries, voice soft like the fake fur lining in one of his mother’s coats that he used to burrow into, trying to hide, when he was little, and his father was shouting. 

He always found him. Everyone always seems to find Chase Stein. He has always been too tall, too broad, too loud, too dumb to hide away. The spotlight catches on him even when he doesn’t want it, even when it means pain. 

“No,” he breathes out before he means to, wants to look away but cannot shift from the way her eyes have locked onto his face. “Not really. He’s.” Chase has never said these words aloud to anyone other than his mother, and that’s different. She already knows, knew. She’s suffered it too. Sometimes he hates that more than anything. Sometimes he hates the fact that she never took him and left more than anything. Sometimes he hates his father more than anything.

Sometimes, most times, he hates himself more than anything. Because, obviously, he must have done something to deserve it? Right? After all, he’s the failure.

“Chase,” her voice is that mix of worry and genuine unease that seems strange on her. She sounds shaken, and that, more than anything, is what makes him settle a hand on her leg, cautiously, barely there, but she doesn’t pull away, doesn’t flinch. 

He rubs his thumb across the bottom of her jeans, right where they hit on her ankle, and there are no bits of soot left behind, no stain. “He’s, uh, he’s just violent. Sometimes. Volatile. That’s all.” The words sound like a stone, like a bit of nothing, but the confession, mottled and sparse as it is still leaves his throat dry and clicking a little when he swallows. It’s not everything he could have said, but it’s all that he could manage. 

There is a shuffle near him, the sounds of things being put down, and when he looks up, Gert has moved closer, managed to slide nearer to him, her legs tucked against her chest now, her chin on her knees, without dislodging his hand from where it remains on the leg of her jeans. Her face is pale, though he doesn’t know if it’s from lack of sleep or because of what he just told her. He doesn’t know, and he doesn’t dare ask. 

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t know,” she says.

And he nods because, no, she wouldn’t know. He never told them, and it was easy to hide. Chase had been clumsy, had been rough and tumble and into sports, since he was very young. Bruises were easy to hide. Chase learned how to keep secrets before he learned how to read. “It’s okay,” he says, and he means that it’s okay she didn’t know. For once, it’s okay that Gert didn’t know something. He didn’t really want her to, still isn’t sure he wants her to, but it’s a door, and it’s open. If he can open a door for her maybe she will reciprocate.

Her fingers on his own are hesitant like she doesn’t really understand how to express physical affection when it’s not Molly, and that doesn’t really surprise him. Gert has always been the hardest on herself when it comes to interacting with people. That thing, unlike so many other things, has never seemed to click. Athena had trouble with people, too. 

“It’s really not,” she tells him. “Chase, it’s really not okay.”

“Oh.” It’s the only thing he can get out of his mouth. It’s dumb. It means nothing, that small sound. It just hangs there, and he thinks, I didn’t come here to do this. 

“Do what?”

Apparently, he’s talking aloud now and that’s almost as mortifying as pulling this secret out of his heart, putting it into the light to expose him. Failure. “I didn’t come here to tell you this. I didn’t. It’s not your problem.” I wanted to help you, he wants to say, but that, no matter how hard he tries, doesn’t come out, not even accidentally.

“Yes, it is.” There’s that tone, that bright, brash bravado. The same tone she would use when inserting herself between one of them and the bigger kids on the playground, shouting them down. “If it’s your problem, it’s my problem.” Said like an older sister. Said like a protector. Said in the same way he might say it. Her voice does not shake, and he is proud of her even as his chest tightens with warmth that this is being directed at him.

Chase probably should think more before he does things. It’s one of his problems, not thinking things through, but sometimes he just lives in the moment. Like lifting her legs to drape them across his lap even as he slides closer to her. It disrupts the way that she’s sitting, and he can see the small trickle of uncertainty that swims across her face before she stows it away, always, always in control, his girl. No, no. Not his. None of them are that. He shouldn’t think that. It’s, what, demeaning? Infantilizes them? Something. Gert would know the word and would not hesitate to tell him. That’s not what he’s trying to do, though. And they are his. In a way. They are all he has. The girls and Alex. All of them wrapped up and bound to each other in strange, intricate little ways. Like friendship bracelets and Celtic knots. He understands the way he and Gert are woven together the least. It frightens him the most. It fascinates him the most. 

“Sorry,” he murmurs, too little, too late because her legs are across his lap now, and she is close enough to him that he can see the flush across her cheekbones, and feel the rush of air when she shakes her head fast. 

Gert says nothing.

“Why, though, is it your problem?”

“Because it’s,” she starts but stops when he looks at her before she can just reiterate the same statement. 

“No, Gert, the truth. Why is it your problem? You don’t like me much. I get it. I haven’t given you a lot of reasons to like me lately. I’ve been a douchebag.” Time and time and time again. Playing the part he cast for himself because he thought it would be the path with the least amount of pain. Surprise! Failed again.

It hurts when she looks hurt, and he still wants to reach out and tuck the hair behind her ear but stops himself. He’s already touching her enough. 

“We’re friends.”

Friends. Fuck. He doesn’t know why that word falls like a bomb in his chest. It should be enough, more than enough. It should be a celebration that he has not pushed Gert away so far that she has stopped thinking of them as friends, but it feels. Different than what he wanted in a way that is confusing. Like most things that are confusing, Chase turns away from it. “Yeah.” He doesn’t mean for it to sound like a rejection, but she doesn’t pull away. Her legs are warm, her face is close and soft, her eyes are glimmers of light behind her glasses, and her hair, fading purple, falls more and more into her face.

“Hey,” she says, something flinty in her voice, that rage, that fire he remembers from the playground and the couple of marches that she talked them all into attending with her (all except Molly left at home, safe, because Gert wouldn’t put her in harm’s way), and he looks at her because that’s the no-nonsense voice, and he is terrified that it is being directed at him. “It’s not your fault.” 

It is not being directed at him, he knows, in a blink, in a flash, in an instant, as her shoulders stiffen, as her mouth presses into a line.

“It’s not your fault, Chase. Whatever happened. Whatever he did. It’s his fault. It’s not yours.”

No one has ever said that, and it bounces off because of course it does because his father is brilliant Victor Stein, and he is not. And some of it must be his fault for baiting some beast that lives in the caverns of his father’s troubled heart. So he shrugs, but still. It’s nice to hear it. And Gert says it, the way she says so many things, with such sincerity that he knows she thinks it’s true, knows that she believes it. Gert believes in so few things that this is a gift even if he cannot fully accept it. All he does is shrug.

Gert scoots even closer, and her fingers on his chin as she guides him to look at her are tiny but stronger than he ever would have imagined. How many battles are you fighting, he wonders, meeting her eyes, and it is hard to look at her when she burns like the sun. Harder to look at her than it is to look at the swirling kaleidoscope of colors that Karo becomes when she uses her powers. And this is Gert with no powers. Just her. Athena. Rising from the depths of Zeus’ body to spring forth unbidden, almost unwanted, from his head. Truth born anew.

“It’s not your fault.” She pauses, blinks, swallows, and he tries not to watch her throat, her lips, the way she bites the bottom one in a gesture that he knows means she is nervous. “Do you believe me?”

His voice is thick when he tries to speak, and he has to clear his throat before continuing. “I believe that you believe what you’re saying.”

“Is that enough?” 

Chase had wandered into this room in the middle of the night to find her curled around a tablet pretending to read, obviously distressed, and the tables have been turned on him. He had found her and wanted to comfort, wanted to mend, but instead, she is the one protecting him. Again. Like on the playground. Brains over brawn. Why did I ever let you slip away? Why did I ever let you stop being my friend? Because, he thinks, because you can be too hard to know with the mirror of your eyes always reflecting people’s flaws back onto them.

He does not know how to answer her.

“I’ll keep saying it until it’s enough. I’ll keep saying it until you ask me to stop.”

Chase isn’t sure that it will ever be enough if he will ever ask her to stop. “I could,” he starts, and it’s unusual for him to be lost for words. “I could live with that.”

Gert nods, but her hand hasn’t left his face. Her fingers feel like branding irons, and he wonders if they will leave marks when she finally lets him go. As though realizing what she is still doing, she pulls back, looks away, flustered, oddly shy for once. And he is reminded of how her legs are across his lap, his hands curled gently over the tops of them, thumbs brushing across the fabric of her jeans.

“Why weren’t you sleeping?” he asks when the silence grows too thick again, and he wants to get the topic off of him. He has exposed enough for one night. Maybe some other time he will walk her fingers across the scattering of scars on his body, explain each one, and she can tell him that they are not his fault, either. Maybe then he will stop feeling them ache when the nightmares come.

“I was,” she pushes her hair behind her ear and continues looking at the floor instead of him. “I was wondering what would happen.”

“Happen?”

“When we get caught.”

Chase hasn’t considered this at all. To be honest, he thought they would simply coast by on their own, run away to Canada or Mexico or somewhere else. Trust Gert to be the one thinking along the lines of reality. Them getting caught makes much more sense. They are six kids from powerful, rich families. They are not lost causes, they are not street kids. It is harder for them to disappear. “If they,” he means their parents, “get caught before we do, we’re fine.”

“Are we?” 

Oh, that tone. He knows that tone. They are not. He has forgotten something again.

“We’re minors. Where will we go?”

“Grandparents, aunts, uncles.” Surely they all have those things, right? He knows his mother has mentioned a brother once, somewhere in Arizona. It sounds awful, but he thinks he could deal. Until he’s eighteen, which isn’t that far away.

The way that Gert twists her fingers together, tight, tight until he reaches for her hands to stop them before she hurts herself, the way she locks their fingers together tells him that he has forgotten something else. This is why he never thinks about what she means to him because she is a universe, and he is just a cup. How could he ever be interesting to her?

“Molly and I.” Her voice breaks, and he hates that sound. “We don’t have anyone other than Dale and Stacey. We’re both adopted. I might be able to swing legal emancipation, but Molly.” She doesn’t finish. She doesn’t have to because Chase has put the pieces together even if it feels like too little too late. Molly is too young for that. Molly will probably go into the system, lost to them. He remembers Gert’s fingers around Molly’s wrist on that afternoon years ago. “She’s my sister!” He sees that same stricken look on her face now.

“Hey,” he squeezes her hand, wants to loop an arm around her shoulders, but their position is awkward so he settles his fingers against the side of her neck instead. It is infinitely more intimate, though equal parts frightening and satisfying. “Hey, we’ll figure it out. We won’t let that happen. We’re a team. No one gets left behind.”

The look that Gert gives him tells him that she isn’t sure he’s in reality, which is where she lives, each and every horrifying day spent pouring over the injustices in the world, all the wrongs that need to be righted. You’re just one person, he wants to say, trying to fix everything is too much for you. But this is Gert. If anyone can manage it, it is her. He wants to be there, he realizes. He wants to be there while she tries. Even if she fails. He wants to be there. To help. If she’ll let him.

“Chase, it doesn’t,” she starts, but he tilts his head to the side and looks at her, fingers tracing over her cheek, and she falls into the kind of stunned silence that he has never known from her before.

“There’s this song I remember that used to make me feel calm and safe when we were kids. You remember?” 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Chase knows she’s lying. For one, it’s her song, and for another, well, Chase doesn’t think he has seen Gert Yorkes forget anything. Ever. He does not sing, cannot sing well, but he’s going to do this because he doesn’t know what else to do, because it feels as right as his fingers on her cheek, because she has comforted him and he wants to repay the favor. He wants to help her however he can.

“Let’s go to sleep. There is a dream we can share,” his voice wavers, he blushes, Gert watches him with round eyes and no expression. It makes it harder, but he forces himself to continue. “Just you and me in a floating sea in the air. What’s left below, I’ll never know.”

He brushes the thumb of his other hand, still wrapped around hers, across her knuckles. She is shock still, just looking at him, but he manages to continue regardless even though his voice is not good, and he is butchering it. “You are the moon in a quiet night terrified.” That line is more him than her, he thinks. “Reach for the clouds, I’ll be around, and by your side.” He means it, wonders when he will be able to say it to her in a way that is not her own words through his mouth. And Chase isn’t sure if he has moved closer or if Gert has, but her lips are right there now, slightly parted, and her eyes are wide with an expression he’s only seen rarely, fear. Oh no, he thinks. Please no. Not you. Be wild, be furious, be bright. Not afraid in a corner the way he has spent so much of his life.

“What’s left below,” his hand has threaded into her hair, stroking the nape of her neck, and she is so close now that he can hear her breathing, slightly faster than it should be, and Chase remembers that Gert used to suffer from asthma attacks when they were younger. “We’ll never know.” 

It seems to take forever for either of one of them to move or say something. Chase is not surprised when Gert breaks the silence. “You’re wrong.” His heart immediately stops at the words. “I do like you.” And then starts again. So fast that it thinks it might shudder right out of his chest and onto his lap. 

Oh. Okay. He can live with that. He can live being liked by Gert, bright as Athena, whose eyes are still wide, who is still blushing. Maybe, though, maybe he can prove he is not a failure. Maybe he can find the courage to try for something else.

“Can I kiss you?” his whisper is so soft, he wouldn’t know that she heard it except for the slight nod.

When Chase kisses her, it is wholly different from kissing Karo. It’s not just that his heart clenches tight, tight like a fist, or that his chest feels like it has been lit from the inside by a rocket. Mostly, though, it is different because Gert kisses back.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on my [Tumblr](http://sarkastically.tumblr.com/) which is a mishmash of so many fandoms it's probably confusing.


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